


Tears Like Diamonds on the Ground (The "Someone to Carry You" Remix)

by SRoni



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 12:01:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1427749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SRoni/pseuds/SRoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nymphadora Tonks always wanted to be an Auror, from the time she knew what the word was. But some jobs come with a high price.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tears Like Diamonds on the Ground (The "Someone to Carry You" Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Trovia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trovia/gifts).
  * Inspired by [It's Not A Joke](https://archiveofourown.org/works/138343) by [Trovia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trovia/pseuds/Trovia). 



Tonks remembered the first war. She was seven when the first war ended, but she still remembered.

She remembered the fear.

She remembered friends of her family disappearing, and she remembered realizing that some of them had hid, but most of the disappeared ones had died and weren't coming back.

She remembered wishing that she were big and strong and knew enough about magic to go off and fight, because that's always been how Nymphadora Tonks preferred handling fear.

But since she was seven when it ended, that really wasn't much of an option.

By the time she entered Hogwarts, she already knew exactly what career she wanted to work towards, and she studied hard in the classes she'd need the most, absorbing all the knowledge she could. Her first few months in Potions were _abysmal_ , plain and simple, Snape was muttering curses under his breath every time she came into his classroom. (For years, any time someone made a horrendous mistake in Potions, it was referred to as "pulling a Tonks", until Neville Longbottom replaced her as being widely known as the worst Potions student Snape had ever had to deal with.) But she studied hard, she sought out the students that were actually doing well in the class and pestered them and harried them until they relented and agreed to help her understand and learn, and by the end of her first year, she was one of Snape's best students, though she wasn't making the top marks, since she wasn't a Slytherin.

She knew she wanted to be an Auror, and she worked _hard_ to make that dream a reality. (Transfiguration came a lot easier than Potions; as a Metamorphmagus, she had an innate understanding for how to twist how things looked to turn them into what she wanted them to be. Everything else fell between Transfiguration and Potions.)

She failed her Apparition exam the first time she took it. She'd managed to only splinch a finger, and they reattached it quickly, with no permanent damage, but after that, she had nightmares of splinching herself worse. But she worked hard to wipe her mind of that when it came to Apparition, and she practiced and practiced and practiced and _practiced_ , and on her second try at the test, she passed with flying colours.

She was _going_ to be an Auror. That was all there was to it.

Upon completing her Hogwarts education, she received the second most important letter of her life (the first one being her Hogwarts letter, of course), telling her that she'd been accepted into the Auror training program.

That was only the first step, of course. Getting _into_ the program was hard enough. _Staying_ in it was even harder. A _lot_ harder. Aurors had a wash rate of over 80%. Tonks was determined to be one of the less than 20%.

She survived the first few weeks of the training, and then it was time for the senior Aurors to pick a trainee to mentor. Over half of the initial trainees had already been dropped from the program, and Tonks desperately wanted to _not_ be the next one. The trainees had been paired against each other for yet another dueling exercise, only this one was bigger because everyone would be fighting at the same time and the only rules were "don't kill each other". It was _drastically_ more important than any of the others since it would dictate which Auror chose which trainee to mentor (and some trainees wouldn't _get_ a mentor; this was an elimination duel, even if that's not what was being said). Tonks took her position in front of her partner/opponent, watching for the moment, and by the time the curses started flying through the air, she was already sending off her own and dodging the red beam coming at her, sending another at Pogsden in retaliation, and the next thing she knew, a scarred hand was landing on her shoulder and everyone in the room went still and silent.

Mad-Eye Moody _never_ took on a trainee to mentor. _Ever_. The last time he'd done so was before the War, and no one had forced him to take on another one again.

But he'd just chosen her.

And Nymphadora Tonks was scared _shitless_.

Her training under Moody's tutelage started immediately. Most people considered Mad-Eye Moody to be paranoid beyond the telling of it. Most people would be right. What those most people didn't take into consideration was that Mad-Eye Moody was one of the very few Aurors to survive being an Auror for the entire war. He taught constant vigilance, barked it at her at any hour from any place, because he had _lived_ constant vigilance and it had kept him alive.

The first week of her training, Tonks felt like she was on the verge of a breakdown. Moody was shouting at her all the time, correcting her loudly on everything she did wrong (and it seemed like _everything_ she did was wrong), telling her everything she needed to do better and how to do it. But there was something oddly soothing about the way he did it; he didn't single her out for anything. Yes, he rode her harder than he did any of the other trainees, but she was _his_ trainee, and she quickly realized that the less he corrected you, the less hope he had for you. The simple fact that he spent so much energy and time on _her_ as he did meant that he had the most hope for her than the other trainees of that year (perhaps of the other trainees in multiple years, since she was the first trainee he took on since the first war). Tonks lost five pounds in that first week, in addition to the fifteen she'd already lost despite the muscle being added to her body, and she became adept at dodging the hexes that Mad-Eye would send at her at random moments, trying to teach her Constant Vigilance.

The first time she killed someone, it wasn't an accident, but neither was it entirely on purpose. She and Mad-Eye and a group of three other Aurors and their trainees had been sent to investigate a couple that the Aurors were positive were Death Eaters and had information on Voldemort's return, and it was a matter of gathering the proof and the information. But everything went to hell, and curses started flying through the air, and Tonks operated on the autopilot that had been drilled into her by Mad-Eye and years of self-training before that.

Tonks dodged the green blazes, the stunners and the hexes, her body responding through sheer muscle memory, and she let loose a volley of cutting curses and explosive jinxes, and at least one of them found its target. Tonks _watched_ as Divholin was struck and fell. She didn't have time to watch him die, but when they found him after the skirmish, she knew that it had been because of the spells cast by her wand.

It was neither an accident, nor was it entirely purposeful. It had simply been what she'd been trained to do, and she performed her job.

But it still affected her, and she wasn't sure how exactly to deal with it.

Tonks was out of sorts for a few days, snapping whenever someone did something too loud, disturbing her from looking at the ink that seemed to be staining her fingers from writing the reports, but only because she hadn't stained her hands in the blood. She didn't even understand why she was reacting the way she was. All she knew was this was how she was reacting and feeling. But not remorse, not regret. Regret that it had happened, for human life was sacred, but not regret that she had done it, not when they'd been fired upon first.

After three days of a relief from the constant barks for Constant Vigilance, Mad-Eye approached Tonks while she was reading over the other Auror's reports from the short fight. "You know, girl," his blue eye was something resembling kind, his gravelly voice slightly less so as he continued, "You can quit. No one's keeping you here. This life isn't for everyone. It's not for most people. You're good at it, you have the potential to be great at it if you don't die, but the price for this job is high and no one will think less of you if you decide you're not willing to pay it."

Tonks just stared at him for a long moment, her usually exuberant hair a mousy blonde. "I'll think less of me."

The craggy face split into a smile, somehow making the horrific face worse. "And that's why I picked you to train. You're clumsy as hell, you can't take two steps without running into something or knocking something over, but you work hard and you keep going. Just remember: when you can't walk, you crawl, and when you can't crawl, you find someone to carry you. Everyone here sometimes needs someone to carry them."

Tonks looked at Moody in surprise. "Even you?"

"Everyone. I've done more than my share of carrying. I've done a lot of crawling. But even I've needed someone to carry me. There's no shame in asking for it."

Tonks decided right then that she'd rather carry than crawl, and she'd definitely rather carry than ask someone else to carry her. But she started making a list inside her head of people she trusted enough to carry her when she needed it. It was a short list.

Mad-Eye Moody stayed on that list, never straying from the top.

He'd already carried her, if only a little way, before she even realized she needed it.


End file.
